CNN-Based Automatic Prioritization of Bug Reports

Software systems often receive a large number of bug reports. Triagers read through such reports and assign different priorities to different reports so that important and urgent bugs could be fixed on time. However, manual prioritization is tedious and time-consuming. To this end, in this article, we propose a convolutional neural network (CNN) based automatic approach to predict the multiclass priority for bug reports. First, we apply natural language processing (NLP) techniques to preprocess textual information of bug reports and covert the textual information into vectors based on the syntactic and semantic relationship of words within each bug report. Second, we perform the software engineering domain specific emotion analysis on bug reports and compute the emotion value for each of them using a software engineering domain repository. Finally, we train a CNN-based classifier that generates a suggested priority based on its input, i.e., vectored textual information and emotion values. To the best of our knowledge, it is the first CNN-based approach to bug report prioritization. We evaluate the proposed approach on open-source projects. Results of our cross-project evaluation suggest that the proposed approach significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art approaches and improves the average F1-score by more than 24%.